Undelete Software

webguy20

Alright folks, here is the situation.

Father in law has a HP computer he uses to play Microsoft flight sim. Through some calamity he does a full system restore back to factory defaults. he stopped using the computer after that. Is there anyway to recover the save files? He had over 200 hours logged, and would hate to lose it. is there any free "undelete" software that could do the job?

I appreciate the help. Thanks!

Gaslight

Well, he did the right thing by ceasing to use the computer. My understanding is that oftentimes a "deleted" file is not actually erased right away, but rather its space on the disk is simply earmarked to be written over. So if he stopped using the computer as soon as he realized what had happened, there's less chance of his files being overwritten.

The idea of a factory restore is discouraging to me, though. Do we know what exactly that entails? I mean, if it formatted the hard drive...game over, man, game over.

I am sure someone more knowledgeable than me about these things will be along soon, I feel like we have somebody on these forums who does this sort of data recovery stuff for a living, but I could just be imagining that at 1:30 after working on my rig all evening. I am skeptical about the solution, if there proves to be one, turning out to be free though.

Inquisitor77

Let me Google that for you.

DaxterMax

There are several undelete or file recovery software applications out there that can help.
Even if a drive has been formatted, it is possible to recover the files, however, the more new data written to the drive then the more chance the old data may be overwritten and is now lost.

Recuva is one application you could try, there are dozens more from free to commercial.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

It's very important that when you install the application that you install it to another drive and not the main one, because every piece of new data you write to the existing one has more chance or corrupting your old lost data. Either try installing the software to an external drive or USB stick first. Or even better from another PC to a removable drive (provided the software can run self contained from a portable directory).

Best of luck.

webguy20

I actually have his computer here now, and have a SATA drive dock so I'm just going to pull his hard drive and hook it up to my computer. Should be fun. I'll earn a lot of brownie points if I pull this off.

tsmvengy

And then set something up that backs up his flight sim save files.

webguy20

Actually I have a copy of Win7 (he is running vista) and a 128gb solid state drive on order for him. Going to do a clean install without any of the HP crap then format the old hard drive, and set it up to automatically back up the SSD. I think that should help out with the problem.